Collecting The Bones and Learning to Howl
“If you don’t go out into the woods, nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.” (Estés 462) This quote from Women Who Run With the Wolves epitomizes Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s very necessary argument that all women have buried within them a wild woman who has been silenced by a patriarchal culture. Through the use of archetypes and folk stories, Estés reminds women in all stages of life that they will live a much deeper existence if they seek out and embrace this wild nature to live a more authentic, creative, passionate existence in touch with their innate instinct and knowing. When these stories and ideas are applied to a soul starved self, they can be transforming.
Undertaking the reading of Women Who Run With the Wolves is not for the faint of heart. Through 518 pages and sixteen chapters, Estés dives deep into myths and stories meant to symbolize the stages and struggles of a women’s life. Using Jungian psychoanalysis of archetypes, she applies each character in the tales to a part of a women’s own psyche. In addition to the main text, there is an extensive section of notes that further explains many of the cultural and historical aspects of the stories. These notes are absolutely essential to understanding the greater meaning of the text. Also included is a comprehensive bibliography of further reading on feminism and storytelling. This is a book that requires in depth reading and reflection and would best be read more than once because there is so much heavy information that it cannot just be skimmed and set on a shelf. It is meant to be studied and returned to again and again. “The book is best approached as a contemplative work that is written in twenty some sections. Each section stands on its own.” (Estés 476)
Because of the length and scope of the book, it is very easy to get lost in the forest of information that is presented here, much like the characters in many of the stories get lost in symbolic forests. Without an understanding of archetypes, it can be confusing to realize that Estés is not always talking about real people in a woman’s life who may have an impact on how she sees herself or who place limits on her success, but that many of these problems are originating within the self. There are many places in the book where Estés is speaking to battles fought within and it can seem like she’s talking about the outside world. It can be helpful to approach this text with a previous understanding of archetypes and the Jungian theory of the collective unconscious.
There is an overlay of mysticism to the book that can be off putting to someone seeking a logical, step by step guide to reclaiming the wild nature. There is much that is valuable in the stories and in-depth analysis in the book, but certain readers may become mired in the spiritualism and discard the advice on reclaiming the wild heart. Advice on such diverse topics as mothering, creativity, love, body acceptance, aging, rage, shame, and forgiveness. Here it may be best for the reader to take only the advice they feel applies to their own life, and tune out the rest of the of the elaborate prose with which the book is written. Because of that elaborate prose, this book may be more suited to those readers who enjoy flowery wording and a spiritual, mystical way of viewing the world.
While the book is written for women and mentions menstruation, childbirth, and menopause, Estés stated in an interview, when asked how her book could apply to transgender women and non-binary people, “There is not, as far as I know, and I have over my lifetime consulted with myriad crones, hobbits, faeries, gnomes and leprechauns, any final saying so about what is a woman.” (Hess) While written for anyone identifying as a woman, it will still appeal to a very niche audience of those women. Today’s women may not enjoy the way Estés tends to stereotype what all women want or hope to accomplish in their lives. Her focus is very much on creativity and appealing to the artist’s soul. Writers, painters, poets, sculptors may all be more drawn to the material than someone looking to be CEO of a fortune 500 company, although perhaps that is a stereotype of its own. Because the book is very rooted in myth and stories passed down through generations, it has a very timeless feel that can appeal to women of every generation and is it still relevant to today’s women, as long as they are open to the message of diving deep into the psyche and meeting the characters who live there.
This book is for all women who feel a sense of loss for their wild self. Estés has much to say about the patriarchy and the silencing of women. Through time, women have been removed from their innate, free natures. They have been told by society to behave, to play nice, to play dumb, to not make waves. When women are controlled in such away by a society based in patriarchy, they are silenced. They are subject to mental and physical anguish and a feeling of grief and unknown longing. The old stories of women were changed by society into stories of witches and warnings, rather than celebration. Women have lost touch with the matriarchal knowledge that was passed from mother to daughter and instead stumble through the stages of life blindly. All of the experiences of women – childbirth, sex, food, enjoyment, death, chores – have been sterilized, institutionalized, and capitalized until all that remains of life is drudgery and a faint feeling of something missing. Estés argues that by finding mentors, teachers, and other women to build a support system, by sharing the stories and strengths of women, they can reclaim their place in a male dominated world and correct all of these problems that lead today’s women to feel this sense of loss.
The book is dense and packed with stories and Jungian theory, but at it’s heart it has a few simple messages. (i) Every woman has a wild woman inside her who has been lost to the patriarchal belief that women need to “behave” and “be quiet.” In order to find this wild woman a woman needs to collect the bones of her past life and resurrect the memory of her wild soul. (ii) The views of a culture that doesn’t value women, will cause women to not value themselves. “So many women themselves are afraid of women’s power.” (Estés 89) (iii) When we heal ourselves and in turn the culture, we can heal the planet and the wild. “We can see from similar events that have occurred over our lifetimes that when women do not speak, when not enough people speak, the voice of the Wild Woman becomes silent, and therefore the world becomes silent of the natural and wild too.” (Estés 245) (iv) In order to change this culture for future generations, women need to go deep into their psyche, hone their intuition, and speak out against the sick culture. Women need to leave situations that do not serve them, create art that heals, and learn to not fear their own power. (v) Stories are medicine to help this healing. Stories have been passed down from before there was writing and contain the answers to many of the problems women face. Women should also mine their own lives for the stories that will help them heal.
There are a few problems with the book. The first being its liberal use of metaphor and purple prose. When one or two metaphors could have gotten the point across, Estés will employ four or five. When one or two flowery sentences would have given a touch of poetics, Estés relies on it throughout the text letting much of her point get lost in the translation to simple english. Even though the author states, “The process of each individual is unique and cannot be codified into a ‘do these ten easy steps and all will be well’,” (Estés 477), it would be nice to have some concrete steps to take to rectify the problems that are presented in the text. As one reviewer says, “The precise nature of this wildness is difficult to fathom, but, at best, it seems to include a genuine capacity to access feelings and to accept one’s contradictions, while, at worst, it appears to amount to the kind of self-indulgence that prevailed during the ‘me’ generation…The author provides few concrete examples that might help women understand what she expects them to do, and her prose abounds in generalizations and oddities that further undermine her credibility and her considerable scholarship.” (Kirkus) As another wrote, “At times, Estes’s commentary–in which she urges readers to draw upon and enjoy their Wild Woman aspects–is hyperbolic, but overall her widely researched study offers usable advice for modern women.” (Publisher’s Weekly) I have to agree that there is much to take in and turn over in the text, but it would be nice to have a bit of a roadmap as how to navigate the conclusions.
Still, there is much to love here, and much that can lead to an understanding of how stories shape our understanding of life. By showing the reader how to deconstruct a story and look for the symbolism, how to apply the characters to own’s own psyche, Estés teaches the reader how to be a better reader of all narratives. The techniques shown in the stories in Women Who Run With the Wolves can be applied to any story, movie, poem, or even song. What is the symbolism? What do the characters represent? How does that speak to a life? Estés explains that many stories handed down through centuries have been changed from their original matriarchal messages, to be representations of the church or the patriarchy. At some point old crones became witches, old symbols came to mean new things, evil and good were applied to morals that may at one time have meant the opposite. By learning about archetypes that appear again and again in a culture’s tales, a reader can come to learn what that character is meant to symbolize. Perhaps a magician is one who can speak with both the spiritual and earthly world. Perhaps a witch is a crone with a lesson. Perhaps an apple tree is a sign of knowledge and life. Knowing these symbols and archetypes can lead to a deeper understanding of all stories. “Stories are medicine,” (Estés 466) and they can heal a culture with a deep wound.
The message at the heart of Women Who Run With the Wolves, aside from the need for women to reclaim their wild, is for women to reclaim their creativity and to let art flow through and transform, both the artist and the world. “Art is not just for oneself… It is also a map for those who follow after us.” (Estés 13) The world can dirty a woman’s psyche and stop the flow of her creative waters, but there is always a path to cleaning up the sludge and getting things moving again. Listening to the instinctive voice inside, reclaiming a space in the world, having a circle of women for support and laughter, rest, solitude – all will help clean up the creative flow. In turn, the creative flow will heal the heart. Estés lists some “general wolf rules for life,” the last of which is “Howl often.” (461) No longer should women live in a benign, nice silence. They should howl loud and often and let it shake the foundations of society until all are free.
Works Cited
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books, 1995.
Hess, Amanda. “The Wild Woman Awakens.” The New York Times, 17 Dec. 2019_,_ www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/arts/Women-Who-Run-With-the-Wolves.html.
Kirkus Reviews. “Women Who Run with the Wolves.” Kirkus Reviews, 20 July 1992, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/clarissa-pinkola-estes/women-who-run-with-the-wolves/.
Publisher’s Weekly. “Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.” Publisher’s Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780345377449. Accessed 16 November 2023.